Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each virtual machine can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., processor, memory, ports, and the like) such that specialized services that each of the previous physical machines performed can be run in their native operating system. For example, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, can allocate the computing resources of one or more host servers into one or more virtual machines and can further provide for isolation between such virtual machines. In such a manner, the virtual machine can be a representation of a physical machine by software.
In many virtual machine implementations, each virtual machine is associated with at least one virtual machine disk, hard disk, or image located in one or more files in a data store. These virtual machine disks or images are commonly referred to as virtual machine storage files or virtual machine files. The virtual machine image can include files associated with a file system of a guest operating system.